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Wednesday, February 6, 2013

The Impact of AIDS Activism: An Interview with David France

By Larkin Callaghan

The development of an award-winning film about AIDS activism and what we can learn from it

How to Survive a Plague, an Academy-Award nominated documentary released in the fall of 2012, chronicles the start of ACT UP
(AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power), an AIDS activist organization
started by newly diagnosed HIV-positive individuals and their advocates
in New York City in 1987. The film details how ACT UP grew from a small,
local, grassroots initiative aimed at forcing the public to acknowledge
the epidemic and its devastating impact, to an organization with
thousands of members that transformed AIDS drug policy. Through
political action like protests, public funeral ceremonies, and storming
the buildings of the National Institutes of Health, ACT UP initiated
‘treatment activism,’ accelerating the development and distribution of
AIDS treatment drugs and changing the pharmaceutical industry’s closed
door research and development process to one that incorporated the
insight and research of activists themselves. By including footage from
ACT UP activists and interviewing organizers who became lifelong
advocates in the fight against AIDS, writer and director David France
crafts a compelling storyline underscoring how the movement opened the
eyes of the public to the struggles of those with HIV/AIDS and how ACT
UP’s unrelenting demands for government acknowledgement and action
changed the landscape and future of those diagnosed with the virus from a
death sentence to a manageable, chronic disease. Mr. France discusses
the development and evolution of the film and helps articulate what
viewers can take from it.

You wrote extensively
about HIV and AIDS for publications like New York magazine, and other
writings of yours have inspired films. What was it that compelled you to
take on the task of writing and then directing a film about the history
of AIDS activism as opposed to staying in the writer’s chair?

I wanted to go back and look again at those years before 1996, and
revisit them in order to try to make some sort of sense about what
happened then. To mine those years for the lessons; the legacy; for a
deeper understanding about what it meant that we’d all been through such
a dark period of plague at a time when so few people were paying
attention to it. That was my challenge.

The first thing I did was return to some of the videotape that I knew
existed because as anybody who was doing reporting on the ground back
then knew, cameras were everywhere—people with AIDS and their advocates,
activists and artists, family members, and independent news gatherers
were all shooting. That was all made possible with the arrival in 1982
with the revolution of the prosumer video cameras. They were suddenly
available, and suddenly cheap, and they were taken up by this community
in a remarkable way.

So I went to look at some of the tapes; there is a collection at the New
York Library of some of the video work produced by ACT UP itself. And
then I thought, you really can’t tell the story without the cameras,
because the cameras played such an integral part. In fact, the camera
itself was kind of a character in those years. And I thought, I’m
actually looking at the project—the project is in trying to tell the
story and make sense of it by going back and actually re-purposing those
images for future generations.
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To read more of David France's interview with Larkin Callaghan of the 2x2 Project, click here.